


sweet as cherry wine

by darlingofdots



Series: repeat performance [1]
Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Blood, Body Horror, Dios Apate (major), Multi, POV: 2nd Person, So just be aware, if you're reading this you know that this is not a healthy situation, inadvisable threesome, not a lot but still
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-24
Updated: 2020-11-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:29:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27702797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingofdots/pseuds/darlingofdots
Summary: You had let the Saint of Patience bring the wine, which had been a mistake.Dios Apate (major)
Relationships: Augustine the First/John Gaius | Necrolord Prime/Mercymorn the First, Mercymorn the First/Cristabel Oct
Series: repeat performance [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2026058
Comments: 8
Kudos: 61





	sweet as cherry wine

You had planned this for centuries.

When you had realised, so long ago you could not really recall anymore, that God had to die, you had known it would come to this eventually. You had agreed upon it, shaken hands on the plan, and refused to think about it for five hundred years because the very thought was nauseating, until the small hours of the night, when your skin and your hands betrayed you and you screwed your eyes shut and pretended you were thinking about somebody else. It had been so long.

Still, now that the moment had come, every fibre of your being rebelled.

You had dressed with infinite care, smoothing out the wrinkles from a dress you had not touched in a millennium, and brushed out your hair until it shone. The weight of it cascading loose down your back reminded you of someone who had tangled her fingers in it and whispered your name against your lips and she was gone, now, and that was why you pinned opal studs to your earlobes and hung a pendant low in the valley of your breasts and smudged your eyes with paint so your irises stood out in your face. The dress clung to your body like water, like regret, the silk a deep, rich red like thickening blood. It made you look beautiful, elegant, and it was held together by spite and a single clasp between your shoulder blades. You inspected your reflection in the shaving mirror over the sink, cocked your head, adjusted a fold of fabric. You reminded yourself of why you had agreed to this, and why you had dedicated the past thousand years to a single objective. You took a deep breath, pretended not to know what you were about to do, and went to your eventual death.

God had made the Erebos His seat for almost sixty years, which infuriated you, but He would hear nothing on the subject. He had claimed for himself a modest suite of rooms furthest from the engines, where it was quiet, and when He had heard that you were coming He had insisted to cook you all dinner. You had offered to help, knowing He would not let you, which was why you had offered. After more than nine thousand years, you still knew Him too well.

You had let the Saint of Patience bring the wine, which had been a mistake.

All throughout dinner, you were trying. You were trying so hard, too hard, to be pleasant and good company and to dull all your sharp edges into something acceptable, something palatable, something she would have smiled at and whose cheeks she would have kissed. If someone had asked you, you would not have been able to recall anything you ate, because every bite tasted like ash in your mouth. You laughed at His jokes. You only teased Augustine about his tie the once. You bit your tongue when he started talking about his brother.

You had agreed on a script. You had not been in the same room in over ten years, and he still infuriated you, but you had an agreement, so you stuck to your lines, played your part. There was a rhythm to this game. Everything depended on neither of you falling out of step, but your treacherous mind wanted you to fail, wanted you to crash through a table with a stack of porcelain plates, because at least then it would be over and you could go back to antagonising Cohort generals and watching the stars rise over dying cities.

You sighed about the cold isolation of flipping planets; you agreed that the food was delicious; you reminisced about the last time you had all been together, all eighteen of you, a million years ago. There had been canapés. They had been too salty. The evening had not ended well; you had never been the same afterwards. Nobody mentioned this.

God toasted absent friends. Augustine toasted the dear departed. You said nothing, just drank.

When you kissed God’s hands and prayed for absolution for what you were about to do, He surprised you by skipping a page and raising you to your feet to kiss you, chastely, the Kindly Prince bestowing grace, and it was the easiest thing in the world to part your lips and produce a wistful little sigh. It was so easy, to fist your hand in His shirt, shiny with wear, and reach for the Saint of Patience with the other so when He withdrew from you, you could turn your head and set your lips to Augustine’s instead, but you kept her fist in His shirt, to make sure He watched.

God said, “I was not expecting —”

“Shut up, John,” Augustine said, ignoring your sharp intake of breath, and pushed his hands under His shirt, running his fingernails over the skin of His stomach and chest. You cupped God’s cheek in your palm, felt the stubble there, felt every nerve that fired under the Saint of Patience’s touch. The sensation was exquisitely painful, second-hand as it was, and you were suddenly tempted to throw the script out the airlock.

You didn’t, though. You had agreed to a plan. Augustine was playing his part as if he had been resurrected to it, and you would not be the one to falter. You kissed God and dragged the edges of your fingernails through His hair and across the back of His neck. He wrapped long strands of your hair around His hands and pulled just enough to hurt. You leaned into the pain, reached for it, craved the tension and the stinging, and you barely felt His lips on your jaw, your neck, the dip between your collarbones. If your body had remembered how to feel pleasure, you might have moaned.

Augustine had untucked His shirt and His trousers half undone. You and he were still fully dressed, and you knew that would not do, so you tore Augustine’s tie from his neck and ripped three of his buttons opening the ridiculous confection he wore as a shirt. The movement dislodged the piece of fabric over your left shoulder; it dropped low to the crook of your elbow, laying part of you bare.

God swallowed and licked his lips. “Might I suggest we move this elsewhere?”

So you ended up sitting on the edge of His bed, God reaching around your back to unclasp your dress almost reverentially, his free hand high on your thigh, and Augustine behind you stroking your shoulders with just a little too much pressure, just a little too fast, and ten million insects crawling underneath your skin. You had, in your infinite wisdom, brought a bottle of wine with you. You took a generous swig, although you hated the taste. Red wine was never your favourite, but it was all you had, it washed around your teeth like blood, it was good enough. You turned your head and kissed Augustine, traded him a sip of wine, bit his lip so hard your teeth almost met. The wound healed over before the blood had run down your chin, hot and metallic. It dripped down onto your breast, invisible on your dress, stark against your skin, from where God licked it up in a long stroke up your sternum like a sacrament.

Augustine grasped His shoulders and pulled Him up to kiss him and in turn you divested the Emperor of the Nine Houses of his shabby, ridiculous clothes and got to work with your mouth. It wouldn’t work like this; it would be too easy. You knew this. You did it anyway, applied yourself with all the diligence and discipline you could scrounge up from the shrivelled recesses of your soul — you had never been a generous lover. You had never needed to be. You could still taste Augustine’s blood.

As you expected, God pushed you away, but He laid you back on the bed and held you down with one hand while He used the other to deliver your body to oblivion, and what did it matter that you almost burnt out your nerve endings for that one tiny sliver of bliss? You clenched your fists in the sheets and arched your back and held your breath and begged her for forgiveness.

The trick was to manoeuvre yourself between the two of them at the climax of the theatrical. You had one hand at the nape of God’s neck, His tongue caressing yours, and the other wrapping around Augustine in slow, even movements, and both of them panting, both their bodies screaming with exertion and sensation and tight as bowstrings, and it was the work of a heartbeat to nudge them both where you needed them to go, gently, almost lovingly. This was flesh and skin and nerve endings and neurotransmitters, and you knew those as your closest friends, as an artist knows her pigment. It was beautiful, if you did not think about it too much; a symphony of signals, impulse and reaction, spreading from your fingers through two bodies in perfect harmony, your tiny spark of thanergy mutating into a blazing crash of bright, hot release. Augustine’s eyes flew open at the last; he reached out to squeeze your arm, once, in solemn triumph, before he fell back into the cushions, spent and used up.

God withdrew with a muttered curse and sat back on His heels. His hear was plastered to His forehead with sweat, His crown discarded somewhere on the path between the bed and the dinner table. He trailed the tips of his fingers from your collarbone to the sharp angle of your hip and back up. His touch and gaze on your tainted skin were all tenderness. Underneath your dermis, ten million insects writhed.

**Author's Note:**

> Generously encouraged by the People's Tomb discord server. Their faith in me far outweighs my own.
> 
> tumblr @darlingofdots


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